Video: What do "They" Really Mean When They say, 'Trust the Science'?

Story at-a-glance

Whistleblowers Expose Corruption at the EPA

Corbett starts out by reviewing a recent Intercept story, published in two parts: "Whistleblowers Expose Corruption in EPA Chemical Safety Office,"² published July 2, 2021, and "Leaked Audio Shows Pressure to Overrule Scientists in 'Hair-On-Fire' Cases,"³ published August 4, 2021.

According to four whistleblowers — Elyse Osterweil, Martin Phillips, Sarah Gallagher and William Irwin, all of whom are scientists employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and hold doctorates in toxicology, chemistry, biochemistry and medicinal chemistry — managers and career staffers in the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention have tampered with the risk assessments of dozens of chemicals to hide their dangers. According to The Intercept:⁴

"The whistleblowers, whose jobs involve identifying the potential harms posed by new chemicals, provided The Intercept with detailed evidence of pressure within the agency to minimize or remove evidence of potential adverse effects of the chemicals, including neurological effects, birth defects, and cancer.

On several occasions, information about hazards was deleted from agency assessments without informing or seeking the consent of the scientists who authored them.

Some of these cases led the EPA to withhold critical information from the public about potentially dangerous chemical exposures. In other cases, the removal of the hazard information or the altering of the scientists' conclusions in reports paved the way for the use of chemicals, which otherwise would not have been allowed on the market."

At the EPA, Following the Science Is a Punishable Offense

The EPA, according to these whistleblowers, is violating the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and when staffers actually do follow the science wherever it leads, they are punished.

In a statement to The Intercept and Rep. Ro Khanna, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the EPA whistleblowers state that they fear "their actions (or inactions) at the direction of management are resulting in harm to human health and the environment."

They certainly have cause for concern. For example, one recent study⁵ warns exposure to organochlorine pesticides and polybrominated diphenyl ethers during pregnancy can cause the chemicals to accumulate in multiple fetal organs and contribute to chronic health problems. This is the first study to demonstrate that toxic chemicals can be present in the fetus even if the mother does not have detectable levels in her blood. As noted by Beyond Pesticides:⁶

“… studies like these help government and health officials better identify fetal exposure contaminants and subsequent health concerns otherwise missed by current chemical monitoring methods.”

In Part 2⁷ of its report, The Intercept discusses a particular chemical that Irwin had been assessing. He had concerns that the unnamed chemical in question was analogous to bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical now recognized for its detrimental effects on reproduction, fertility and human hormones.

When he refused to sign off on the chemical as safe, he was removed from the assessment, and the chemical was approved, despite the potential harms he'd uncovered.

So, what scientists should we trust? Scientists like these four whistleblowers? Or "the EPA" as a catchall designation, where corrupt career managers have overruled the scientists doing the actual work and who have the actual science credentials?
 

Believing (the Wrong) Science Now Proves You're Racist

As noted by Corbett, this issue is no small matter. Determining what science is "valid" and what's not has enormous repercussions for society. To illustrate his point, he goes on to review the issue of hormone-disrupting chemicals and their reproductive effects.

Some scientists have sounded the alarm, saying our reproductive capability is so severely impacted by toxic environmental factors that by 2045, all couples will require fertility treatment if they want to conceive. Sperm counts have dropped precipitously ever since the 1970s, and the trend is showing no signs of leveling off.

If true, this signals a true existential emergency, but as has become the norm over the past couple of years, the declining sperm count issue is now being reframed as a racist, "far right" issue. This in and of itself ought to signal that we've left science and moved into ideology, but no.

The narrative we're asked to swallow is the complete opposite: That the scientists who made these discoveries used sham science to fit an ideological narrative rooted in white supremacy. Meanwhile, "the science" offered by nonscientists says there's no problem here, and that's that.

Corbett cites a Quillette article by Geoffrey Kabat, "The Sperm Count Culture War," published mid-June 2021, which states:⁸

"The latest entry in the sperm count debate comes from a Harvard-MIT research team led by philosophy professors Marion Boulicault and Sarah Richardson.

They recently published a paper in the journal Human Fertility entitled 'The Future of Sperm Variability for Understanding Global Sperm Count Trends.' They also published an article in Slate⁹ summarizing their findings for a lay audience.

While the scientific paper is dense and difficult to navigate, the Slate article gets straight to the point with its title: 'The Doomsday Sperm Theory Embraced by the Far Right.'

Its subheading elaborates: 'The idea that male fertility is on the decline is an old myth dressed up as science.' The authors tell us why they believe the accepted science on declining sperm counts should be rejected:

'The human species is in grave reproductive danger, according to recent headlines. Some scientists say that sperm counts in men around the world have been plummeting, with Western men approaching total infertility by 2045.

Far-right 'Great Replacement' theorists, who fear that people of color are 'replacing' the white population, have taken up the research with gusto …

The narrative that white, Western men are in danger of emasculation and disappearance has deep roots in white nationalist discourse. It is tied to a nostalgic cultural myth of a past in which white men held unchallenged power.'"

Human Extinction Concerns Dismissed as Fearmongering

As noted by Kabat, the two philosophy professors "all but ignore the science to focus on what they believe is more important — the ideological framing of the issue in socio-cultural discourse."

Interestingly, the paper they published is in response to "what is widely considered to be the most definitive research on science of sperm count decline," Kabat notes, and perhaps that's why they did it. It's real science being debunked as "science driven by ideology," by nonscientists who have an ideological agenda but pretend not to!

Here we have two philosophy professors trying to debunk 50 years of research by some of the most respected researchers in the field — by declaring the whole investigation racist, misogynistic and "overtly white supremacist." They roundly dismiss concerns about impending global infertility and thus human extinction, stating:¹⁰

"What these anxieties have in common with the threat of sperm count decline is the premise that, in an environmentally clean and appropriately-gendered social past, there existed an optimal and natural manifestation of masculinity …

It is all too easy for scientific institutions, with majority-white researchers, to center white people and further these myths, which circulate often unconsciously … The recent sperm count decline research demonstrates how racist, sexist, and Eurocentric ideas can get embedded in the categories that scientists use to analyze data."

In their paper, Boulicault et.al. offer their own hypothesis to explain and dismiss the decline in sperm count as a natural variation that has no bearing on fertility or health — none of which is accurate or true.
 

Expertise Matters

The take-home message here is that philosophy professors can depose (or at least attempt to depose) a team of reproductive health scientists who have spent their entire careers looking at this issue, simply by interjecting their own ideology into the mix, all while accusing the actual scientists of ideology-based hype. And here's how mainstream media covered this clearly insufficient debunking attempt:¹¹

• Yahoo! News — "Freaking Out About Declining Sperm Count? Don't, Harvard Researchers Say."
• The Telegraph — "Threat of Human Extinction from Falling Sperm Counts Greatly Exaggerated."
• Haaretz — "Spermaggedon in the West? Relax, Harvard Has Good News for You."
• Vox — "Sperm Counts Are Falling. This Isn't the Reproductive Apocalypse — Yet."

Kabat writes:¹²

"None of the news stories … so much as remarked on the inflammatory rhetoric of the Boulicault paper, which will appear to the fair-minded reader as an activist manifesto masquerading as a scientific hypothesis. Even the New York Times fumbled this. It provided a useful discussion of some of the questions raised by the Harvard study and presented different points of view …

But it treated the study as a serious critique of the sperm count controversy, giving no indication of Boulicault and colleagues' ideological framing of the issue or that their alternative hypothesis has little to do with science …

It is difficult to explain the deference paid to the Harvard paper by various commentators. Perhaps we are in a time in which even trained scientists are reluctant to call out an uninformed but ideologically fashionable treatment of a high-profile issue."

Are You Seeing How This Applies to the COVID Narrative?

These stories tell us a lot about our current situation, where ideological gatekeepers are commanding us to "look here, not there." Actual, reproducible science by bonafide scientists is being dismissed as "ideology masquerading as science," while fake or flimsy science is being held up as the only science worthy of that designation.

If you chose to trust science that counters the technocratic transhumanist Deep State narrative, well, then you're labeled a racist, a misogynist, a white supremacist, a domestic terrorist or some other unpleasant and derogatory term, the only purpose of which is to shame and shut you up.

As noted by Corbett, when politicians and health authorities urge us to "trust the science," they are referring to select agency-branded science, meaning science that has the stamp of approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization, for example.

The assumption we're supposed to accept is that these organizations aren't tainted by the kind of corruption we're now told exists within the EPA — financially driven corruption that sidelines actual scientists, even within those organizations, that may have serious concerns. But regulatory capture is a longstanding problem, and there's no evidence to suggest it's been rooted out of the agencies we're now told to trust without question. As noted by Corbett:

"As 'The Science' more and more dictates whether you can step outside your own home, or what kind of experimental interventions you are forced or coerced into putting into your body against your will, I hope you understand that the stakes have been raised to the point where this is not some mere philosophical concern. This is the heart of the biosecurity state that we are being steeped in."